Market Update: Trump Sets Up ‘Pax Silica’ Fund to Reduce Global Dependencies – Full Analysis

The Trump administration said on Monday that it intended to create a consortium with more than $1 trillion in assets that will collectively invest in energy projects, minerals and semiconductors in an effort to create a new source for critical goods controlled by the United States.

The voluntary consortium will include countries like Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Sweden, in addition to the United States, which will contribute $250 million toward the investment, Jacob Helberg, the under secretary of state for economic affairs, said in Washington on Monday.

“The fund will serve as a catalyst, a credible call to action for partners around the world to put serious capital behind shared strategic objectives,” Mr. Helberg said at a breakfast for the Hill and Valley Forum, which he co-founded.

The investment is intended to grow out of the administration’s “Pax Silica” initiative, an economic security program established in December aimed at building out a secure global supply chain for semiconductors.

While some details about the consortium remain unclear, U.S. officials have said Pax Silica would lead to more cooperative agreements across the artificial intelligence industries of the partner countries, which include Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, Australia and Sweden. Many of the most important companies powering the global A.I. supply chain are based in those countries, the U.S. officials said.

Mr. Helberg said on Monday that, in light of the threats to the global economy from the war in Iran, the administration was expanding the effort to include energy security. He described the investor consortium as a “coalition of sovereign wealth funds and institutional investors joining forces around a single strategic imperative.” He said the goal was to ensure “that the minerals, ports, corridors, factories and energy assets powering global semiconductor and technology supply chain stay in trusted hands.”